Kahne feels pressure to make Chase

Kahne, who took the rookie title in 2004, has admitted that he wasn't enjoying his racing during the final meetings of 2005, and described his season as 'pathetic' despite taking his maiden victory at Richmond.

Kahne's teammate Jeremy Mayfield has made the Chase twice, and as a result Kahne says it would be unthinkable if the same, missing the Chase, happened again.

"I feel like there's a lot of pressure this year to make The Chase," Kahne said. "I can't miss the Chase three years in a row when Ray's [Evernham] got a car in it each year. That's just not what we need to do.

"It's time to get in The Chase. It's time to perform and finish races. There was more last year that I didn't live up to, so maybe this year we'll do better.

"I showed my skill at Richmond and that was it. It was really a pathetic year. Some of the things I did, some of the crashes I was in I didn't need to be in. I forced the issue. I knew my car was on the edge of crashing and I went past that edge and crashed.

"That was pretty bad driving really. I felt like I made a lot of mistakes with bad racecars. I could have just handled those cars and drove to the finish.

"If I had finished 16th, 17th, 18th somewhere in there instead of crashing and finishing 40th or 42nd, that's where we lost a lot of points. If we had just finished races we probably would have finished five or six or seven spots better in the standings. I feel like I grew up a lot during the year and will calm down a little bit."

Kahne has so far been struggling in the opening two days of Daytona testing, failing to make the top 12 in any of the early practice sessions. However, many of the crew from Mayfield's car last season will work on Kahne's this year in an attempt to pick up his results.

He only finished in the top 10 eight times last season.

"Ray has done a lot of things during the off-season to kind of mix things up, and I think that's what we needed," he added. "Our team was a great team last year, but there were a lot of little things we were missing once in a while, and then I'd make some mistakes also.

"We never got on a roll. We had one or two good races and then two or three bad races. We never got consistently three, four, five good races in a row where we ran good.

"I was happy when it was over. I'm usually not like that. I like to race as much as possible, but I didn't want to race for three or four weeks. I remember the year before when the season was over I still wanted to be racing and after a week I wanted to also."